Wednesday, April 25, 2007

New biofuels process promises to meet all US transportation needs?

Purdue University is promising a revolutionary breakthrough to dramatically increase biofuel production. The process depends on hydrogen which is expensive to produce via electrolysis. So we will see how practical the process will actually be.

Monday, April 16, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Global warming poses a "serious threat to America's national security" and the U.S. likely will be dragged into fights over water and other shortages, top retired military leaders warn in a new report.

The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. "The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts.

The actual report can be found here or direct to the PDF. It will be interesting to see how many leading scientists endorse this report.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

"Scientists are creating a scare to get grant money"Part of the: Common Arguments by Skeptics and Deniers series

A common argument among skeptics/deniers is that scientists fabricate scares just to raise grant funding. If this were true then one would expect scientists to be, on average, a very deceitful and greedy bunch. So lets analyze a few scientists and see exactly what kind of people we are dealing with. The method I used to choose the following scientists was simple. They are the last three scientists that acquired a million dollars and made it to the front page of Digg news service.

Our first stop is a NASA scientist that ended up with $20 million in royalties from inventing the super soaker water gun:

Notice how he spent his money on more research and "returned to his roots". He could have spent his money on a giant house, traveled the world, and spent his money on materialistic things but it would appear this is not the case. Granted he did start his own science oriented business so one could make the argument that he is simply trying to earn more money. On the other hand one could certainly argue that there are more lucrative and less labor intensive ways of earning money than the hardcore physical sciences and he is simply following his heart. I will refrain from making an absolute judgment on this individual.

Next up is Abul Hussam, a chemistry professor at George Mason University in Fairfax. He won a $1 million dollar prize for developing a life saving technology to remove arsenic from water.

How does he plan to spend the cool million? From MSNBC:

Hussam said he plans to use 70 percent of his prize so the filters can be distributed to needy communities. He said 25 percent will be used for more research, and 5 percent will be donated to GMU.

This suddenly "rich scientist" spent his entire million dollar prize on helping others and furthering research. Could you say you would do the same?

It seems from this small sample set that many top academic/federally funded scientists simply are not driven by money and many will freely give it away if they happen to stumble upon it. At least two of these three scientists are at the self actualization stage of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Although these are only anecdotes they go a long way in showing that many top scientists are generally far more altruistic or knowledge loving than the 'grant money scamming Nazis' many politicians and climate change skeptics/deniers such as Senator Inhofe label them as. If these scientists were to claim global warming was a 'no-brainer' would Senator Inhofe be able to label them as scam artists?

More counterarguments against the "grant scam" can be found here. Readers, if you know of other stories please post.

ENDORSED/SOURCED BY!

About Logical Science

The mission of Logical Science is to defend mainstream science. We will do this by exposing how poorly it is portrayed by the mass media and documenting the war on science that industrial and special interest groups have been waging to promote their ideology. Another defensive strategy is to discuss supporting evidence and technologies that will help people adapt. To avoid being a monomaniac some scientific "fun stuff" will be added to spice up the blog. I'm a computational biologist that believes anyone with a high school degree, an open mind and a little time on their hands can understand the science and see just how bad the misinformation is. If I am doing my job correctly, you don't have to believe me, because you can always check the references. I don't want people to have to believe me, because that's not what science is about. You should look at the facts and draw your own conclusions.